Toshiba 32WLT58 review

Features
While the design of the 32WLT58 still needs fixing, everything else that was wrong with the last range has been overhauled or tweaked. There's now an integrated digital tuner for the first time, meaning you can access the electronic programme guide and all of the Freeview digital programming from one remote. There's even a Common Interface slot, which will take a TopUp TV subscription card for more channels through digital terrestrial.

Along with Samsung, Toshiba was one of the first companies to bring LCD TVs to the masses, making 32-inch models under that all-important £1,000 mark. The 32WLT58 is currently just over that, but as you get so many features and connections, it's still a high-value package. The television also offers Toshiba's Active Vision picture-processing technology, which aims to rectify the relatively poor quality of MPEG-2 sources.

If you like to tinker with settings on your new TV to get the best performance, you'll have a field day with the Toshiba. There are the usual contrast and brightness settings, but you can also change individual colour tones. The 'Black Stretch' is much like Samsung's 'Dynamic Contrast' mode, which recognises the black areas of the picture and makes them even darker. It does this on the fly and there's a slight pause before the television darkens the dark areas of the pictures, which can be distracting. If you can look past the lag, the results are actually very good. Hardcore AV enthusiasts and videogamers will find the effects offputting, though.

Performance
There usually has to be a catch with a TV at such a good price, and with the Toshiba 32WLT58 it's picture quality. We really weren't that impressed with the stability of pictures at the lower end, with analogue and digital television throwing up background fizz and juddered movement. We've never seen a flat screen produce the same quality of Freeview pictures as a CRT, but Panasonic and Philips' current LCDs seem far more accustomed to dealing with its inherent artefacts.

If you're more of a movie lover, or spend time on Xbox Live instead of watching TV, then this is the TV for you. Through component or HDMI inputs, the picture gains a far more natural appearance, with fine detail reaching through to the background and a depth of colour that's as good as anything else out there.

Watching a dark film such as Ronin though, we noticed a lack of shadow detail that impacted on the believability of the image. If you're the sort of person that obsesses over imperfections such as these, you'll have to splash out on a Panasonic or Philips screen, but for most people, the small improvement probably doesn't warrant the extra money.

The thin speaker strip underneath the screen looks distinctly underpowered, but audio is both punchy and well rounded from the Toshiba LCD. The television has SRS sound effects to recreate various different environments from the two stereo speakers. If you want more power, you can output directly to a subwoofer thanks to the dedicated output on the side panel.

Edited by Mary Lojkine
Additional editing by Nick Hide